Satelite sites

[SnowFX]

Hi there

I want to drive traffic to one of our eCommerce sites by building satelite sites that focus on our chosen niche longtail keywords. so,

'where can i buy fake snow'

wherecanibutfakesnow.com

The problem is for other keywords ie. fake 'ice cubes', the com and co.uk are already taken.

So, my question is, should i settle for a .net / .biz / .eu etc. or choose the next best keyword/phrase that i can secure a .com/.co.uk top level domain name for?

Many thanks,

Ben

[Debdulal]

So, you want to create satellite websites and then get link back from those sites to your main website right? Sorry to say, but this looks like an attempt to game the SERP by artificially boosting ranking of your websites.

Moreover, it is highly likely that you are going to slap those satellite sites with thin content that nobody likes, believe me search engines have started hating them too.

Ok, let’s imagine that your main ecommerce website somehow manages to get some value from these inbound links coming satellite websites. But what if a Panda refresh gets the network down and the link juice that your main website has been getting so far will be smashed in a matter of second. All your hard work will go in vain. And please do not ignore Penguin. Your main website could come under the scanner of Google for building links unnaturally.

So, here is my suggestion. Rather than wasting your valuable time and money on building something worthless why not make your existing website AWESOME. You can build a great blog and starts sharing great content that will help you earn Links naturally. There are other things to do. Invest in making your website more conversion oriented, reach out to great bloggers and share your expertise in the form of a great article or tool or whatsoever.

In short, start adding value to your website rather than chasing the crappy links and you will be good.

[matbennett]

The domain suffix is unlikely to have a big impact on this sort of tactic.  If this is the way you want to go then just get whichever name is available.

In truth though I'd really weigh up the tactic.  The return from this approach is likely to be low unless you are set up to pretty much automate this at scale (which I am guessing from the question you are not - and is the sort of tactic very much frowned on at SEomoz).

There are two extremes in building such satellites. One is just to throw up some cheap thin content and rely on the exact domain match to do the work. This is not without cost, but not too expensive. However you have a risk attached as this is very likely to come under google definition of spam do could result in your main site getting penalised if you do a lot of it.  The other approach would be to build a quality site that can stand on it's own merit - which obviously costs more. Also don't forget to factor in that you will still need to be link building and doing SEo on the satellite sites too.

Considering that an extra site means an extra large step in the conversion process (you have to get users from site A to site B before purchasing and you will lose a lot of them at that stage), you need to be really sure of the returns.

Many people here will tell you that what you are talking about is spam and you should therefore instead concentrate on building a better core site.

I'd say that what you are suggesting is unlikely to be the best return on your time and you should therefore concentrate that time and effort in to the core site unless you are really sure about what you are doing and understand the risks involved.

Your product is interesting enough that you can probably get much better links much more affordably through a content marketing approach  and get more traffic and sales as a result.  Start a thread here asking for content marketing ideas for a fake snow company and see the responses you get.  I reckon it's a dream product to promote!